John,
Thanks your response to my query. I am glad that you agree that we need to
involve the SQL community in our efforts to establish formal logic as the
foundation for modeling.
I think that we do need to distinguish between our need to establish logic as
the consensus foundation for modeling and industry's need to have an imple-
mentable "standard" for communication. By far the largest share of practictioners in the data community think of standards as a concrete implementation. And
for the purposes of establishing protocols for passing data between machines or
for enabling programmers or users to request data in a predictable, portable
syntax, that kind of standard is critical. It requires the world-wide consensus
that SQL is developing. Of course it must be implementable, and if the SQL2
standard is not, then they have done a poor job. And as you and we have
recognized it must be founded on a firm semantic foundation, and that is logic.
I think for the purposes of garnering support for our project among the SQL
and Express communities, we may hurt ourselves when we formulate our position
as proposing logic as a "standard". It is too often interpreted as implying
a concrete language as a competitor to SQL and Express and KIF and so on. That' is not what we mean, but that is what is heard. Rather we should say that we
are proposing a mathematically precise semantic foundation to guide the
evolution of existing standards. ("Your assignment should you choose to accept
it is ...") This does not alter our position; it only phrases it in non-
competitive terms.
In any case have a good holiday. I'll be talking with you next year.
Jim